If this is your first visit, be sure to
check out the FAQ by clicking the
link above. You may have to register
before you can post: click the register link above to proceed. To start viewing messages,
select the forum that you want to visit from the selection below.

The Current State Of Radeon Power Management

12-07-2011, 06:40 AM

Phoronix: The Current State Of Radeon Power Management

It's been a while since last looking at the state of power management for Radeon GPUs, but here's an updated look at the various options surrounding power management for modern ATI/AMD graphics processors and their effectiveness. Various drivers, graphics cards, and tuning options are compared.

The idea of power management is to reduce the power used and increase battery life. So a benchmark without actually measuring the used power is quite worthless IMHO. What possible conclusion can be draw from this benchmark? That catalyst is still better in power management then the open source drivers? No surprises there.

Comment

It wasn't that long ago that several articles were posted that essentially covered all the information in this article, and no announcements have been made to indicate that anything has changed with regards to power management. What's the point in this article? It's essentially just rehashing the same old story.

Comment

And the one interesting thing to compare, how dynpm stacks up against the 'auto' profile, is sorely missing from the test. On my system, dynpm is still far worse, getting 5C higher just idling on the KDE desktop.

Comment

Recently one of the developers said that people doesnt care much about power management, so its not in high priorities. Can we do something about it? May be some poll? There to many work(opengl, glsl, video acc, new chipset) to see usable pm even in year.

Comment

Michael, the PTS specs on page 2 are terrible to look at. Is this one of those things that's better with a premium subscription? Despite the tablet trend, some of us still have relatively large desktop monitors..

Comment

Recently one of the developers said that people doesnt care much about power management, so its not in high priorities. Can we do something about it? May be some poll?

http://www.phoronix.com/scan.php?pag..._results&num=1 for example? Where power management isn't far behind the other two useful options (2d is mostly fast enough anyway these days, and Gallium and KMS are just means to an end, not that interesting in themselves for end-users).

Comment

I have HD6850, using open source stack, but it consume ~60-80W on idle!. Not acceptable for 7/24 open case...
I can set "low" my GPU manually, than have problems when I require more power for short bursts (like compiz animations...)
Also on "low GPU" state, card consumes ~10 more Watt than "catalyst"...

Does it require much work to implement proper auto or dynPM settings? I think it's shame for AMD. Is there any DRM issue on power management of GPUs?
I simply can't use my card due this. I just detached my radeon 6850 from MB and using integrated 790GX.

Comment

He forgot to mention that dynpm is more or less unusable on a lot of Radeons because it causes display flickering as it cycles through the available clock speeds and it only works when you only have one display. If you have two or more displays it falls back to profile:auto which tends to work fine other than using more power.